are you guys familiar with the term if it ain't broke don't try to fix it
yeah let's talk about it later shall we hi guys welcome back to our channel the number one place
for people who love design art and all things creative you are watching Dantier and Balogh's
channel my name is Laszlo and today we're going to redesign the logos of some high profile youtubers
and when i say high profile i mean like youtube royalty basically for this little exercise i have
chosen three long established mind-bendingly popular youtube channels now these are all
channels which i well i don't follow personally not gonna lie but i still think they have stood
the test of time by accumulating millions of subscribers and billions of views so i thought
it would be educational for some of us graphic artists and designers to take a look at some
of the branding choices that these channels have made and maybe speculate on how we would
push their logomarks even further if we were ever given the chance yeah let's jump straight into it
okay channel number one markiplier mark fishbach or better known online as markiplier is a us-based
content creator with a channel focusing on gaming videos vlogs topical content which in his
own words range from quality content to memeable garbage again his words not mine he's one of those
og youtubers who has been on the platform for over a decade and in his time he has accumulated over
30 million subscribers and still averaging millions of views on pretty much anything he
uploads now his logo and branding has changed a couple of times over the years of course but a
returning element is a pink mustache originating from an alterego-type character from one of his
saturday night live sketch type videos now i don't know if it's just me or every other graphic
designer as well out there who thinks stacking similar shapes on top of each other is just well
it just doesn't feel right so if it was up to me i would create a logo for markiplier which is a
pink mustache but at the same time the mustache is also the letter M you know what i mean well if not
i'll show you just now if you tweak the letter m here and there make it a bit curvaceous at the
right places and we add these fancy spirals onto the ends then the design becomes a bit of a hybrid
piece which is kinda like a mustache right but it's also the letter 'M' this is exactly what i
want to do with this one in terms of technique i'm just working on one half of the design at a time
since it's going to be perfectly symmetric around the sides so whenever i want to see how the shape
would look in the end all i need to do is copy and paste what i got and reflect it horizontally
what takes up most of my time here is playing with the proportions i quite quickly dropped most of
these anchor points in place to get the basic shape and then with the direct selection tool
i move bits of the design around until the ratios of the whole logo just you know they just start to
feel right the original logo also got these little squares as part of the design obviously indicating
pixels and this whole digital/gaming theme of the channel so i think we should use this idea
in the new logo as well now in terms of colors i am just gonna eye drop the pink shade we got in
the original design and mix it with black i wanted to see a couple different versions here first and
foremost try what it would look like if the whole shape was filled with a gradient which works quite
nicely but to stay true to the initial markiplier vision and not go off-brief in the end i decided
to just use fill colors instead once i put the basic shape in place i put that to black then i
duplicated the design scaled it down change it to pink and put this behind the big black outline and
then some minor adjustments later i got something which i think well i think it looks pretty good
but yeah let me know what you think old one or my one okay let's move on to our second chanel
the channel of zoella zoe sugg or as we all know her zoella is the uk born queen of influencers
who has built her youtube channel and her online personality in general on the pillars of makeup
beauty and lifestyle content while quote on quote 'Zoella' the brand kind of outgrown youtube as
time went on and became a female-centric content powerhouse a bit of a beast in its own right with
high profile brand collaborations and own product lines and all that on her personal vlog channel
zoe is still very much actively uploading video content regular vlogs to this day she has been
making videos since 2007 which means she has been on youtube for almost the entire existence
of the platform accumulating over 10 million subscribers on the main zoella channel but also
her vlog channel is more than well received with just a little short of 5 million subs
now the logo which the zoella brand at this moment is operating with is just a capital zed which is
not a bad choice per say but i think if we sat down we would be able to come up with a way to
you know to 'zhoos it up' a little bit shall we again there is nothing
wrong with this monogram logo in fact i quite like it it is quite nice to see
a brand like this which is not going overboard with a typical feminine imagery but i think we
could smuggle a little bit more character onto the design if we do it very very carefully
now i was thinking what if we replaced these typical looking serifs on the sides and built
something more unique something that awakens the feeling of handwritten calligraphy-like type
but in a not so obvious way so the line would be wide on the end then it would be thinning out
on the other and with the arch tool we would bend the whole thing a little bit to imitate
the feeling of a paintbrush just swooshed across the design now this could relate to the idea of
eyeliners nail polish or just in general 'practicality' and doing things your own
way which i think aligns with her and her brand vision quite nicely
then i wanna roughen up the edges of the letter here and there again to make the whole thing feel
a bit more handmade for this what i'm gonna do is throw out some new lines then i open
up another brush library in illustrator maybe one of these charcoal effect ones
switch my new lines to these brushes and then i just put them onto the sides of my design
now i don't want this to be eye-catchingly obvious so i'm just gonna subtly blend the
pixel perfect lines with these rough brush strokes by expanding everything then with the
shape builder tool i add and subtract these bits and pieces to get to my final design
i'm quickly gonna make a circled version as well
with the very same technique and voila we got ourselves a new version of the zoella logo
okay and last but not least channel number three pewdiepie felix kjellberg or as seemingly the
whole word seems to know him pewdiepie is a swedish youtuber who is not unlike
markiplier has started his channel on video game playthrough kind of content and as his
subscriber base grew and grew he expanded into the themes of comedy sketches vlogs and all
types of other topical content now if zoella is the queen of influencers then pewdiepie is
the king of youtube itself with his 111 million subscribers i think i'm correct in saying that
his channel is the biggest non-corporate channel which is owned by one person and not some
huge corporate identity now in terms of logos he has gone through a couple different ones over the
years of course currently using this psychedelic one so i thought let's open up illustrator one
more time and tweak this one a little bit as well okay i gotta be honest with you guys i'm
not 100 sure what the concept is behind this meta geometric style logo but nevertheless
we are going to respect the nature of this original logo and build something on it okay
now i had an idea looking at a previous logo design of pewdiepie's which i think
is a bit more playful and iconic with the brofist and the capital p so i thought
what if we created a bit of a hybrid and hide the letter 'P' inside this current logo design
it is a very simple tweak all i need to do is draw out a big square shape for the border
then a small one in the middle and then with the pen tool i'm going to create a series of lines
which do resemble the original rectangle shapes on three sides but then on the left they will come
down vertically onto the bottom of the base square thus creating an ever so subtle letter p design
hidden in the icon - do you see it? now we could do this mathematically perfect
but i think to resemble the original logo it's better to just freehand some of this work when
it comes to adjusting the line weights and some of these angles so all i'm gonna do here is with
the direct selection tool i'm just gonna move some of these points slightly with my arrow keys
as a last touch i think we should open up the base square on the bottom with the scissor
tool and then bring down the red fill color rectangle onto the edge of the composition
my hope is this way the capital letter p will come through in a bit of a clearer way
something like this
now i know what you're thinking looking at this whole lineup we didn't
really change much of these logos did we well no we didn't do you know why well the truth is
i just don't think we should as some closing thoughts i would just like to remind you that one
only bad design hits you in the eye good design is invisible and two i don't know who needs to hear
this but you don't have to reinvent the wheel of graphic design every time you build something...
don't take up on the task of 'fixing' something that really doesn't need fixing yeah all of these
original logos belong to people with a combined net worth of millions of dollars so i think they
will be just fine without redefining their whole brands by me or you you feel me? nevertheless
feel free to let me know if you enjoy this type of redesigning logos type content because if you did
well then we gonna make more our regular creative crew members are fully aware that we don't only
talk about graphic design and illustration on this channel but also interior design architecture and
everything else overlapping all these cool things yeah so if that sounds like something that you're
interested in feel free to follow along leave a like to help us reach even more people with this
channel and i hope to see you guys with some other cool creative stuff next time okay see you around
you